From the studio to the 18 th hole, time was right for a change. The final track here, ‘My 1 st Song’, is just the end credits for a career: “I’m about to go golfin’,” he says. He assembled a production entourage that, today, would cost an impossible amount of money to bring together: Timbaland, 9 th Wonder, Eminem, Just Blaze, Rick Rubin, DJ Quik, Kanye West, The Neptunes… Nobody big, then. Jigga was at the peak of his powers, flowing prose with a palpable confidence – throughout, he inflates his own ego to incredible proportions while offering influential credit where it’s due, via samples, to Run-D.M.C., Biggie and UGK. ‘The Black Album’ was intended as the end, so it pulled no punches. But it’s Carter’s expert management of these situations that got him to the point, in 2003, where he’d achieved enough to split from spitting. He’s benefitted from timely associations – from Big Daddy Kane to Foxy Brown, Kanye West to Pharrell Williams – and publicity-piquing feuds in his time: a pathetic spat with Nas stands out. Like The Notorious B.I.G., RZA and so many more talents to emerge in the early-to-mid 1990s, he cast aside a criminal past to make good with his music, ultimately taking it to the global stage. But few of the man’s (once-) peer-level MCs successfully spread themselves across so many commercial avenues with such incredible success. The “best rapper alive”? The “motherf*cking greatest”? Hardly. Look back at the last decade’s roster of hip-hop heavyweights and its maker, Brooklyn bad boy turned multimedia entrepreneur Shawn Carter, stands proud as a legitimate kingpin. ‘The Black Album’, released on November 14th, 2003, still matters.
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